Adaptive sinusoidal modeling of percussive musical instrument sounds

Abstract

Percussive musical instrument sounds figure among the most challenging to model using sinusoids particularly due to the characteristic attack that features a sharp onset and transients. Attack transients present a highly nonstationary inharmonic behaviour that is very difficult to model with traditional sinusoidal models which use slowly varying sinusoids, commonly introducing an artifact known as pre-echo. In this work we use an adaptive sinusoidal model dubbed eaQHM to model percussive sounds from musical instruments such as plucked strings or percussion and investigate how eaQHM handles the sharp onsets and the nonstationary inharmonic nature of the attack transients. We show that adaptation renders a virtually perceptually identical sinusoidal representation of percussive sounds from different musical instruments, improving the Signal to Reconstruction Error Ratio (SRER) obtained with a traditional sinusoidal model. The result of a listening test revealed that the percussive sounds modeled with eaQHM were considered perceptually closer to the original sounds than their traditional-sinusoidal-modeled counterparts. Most listeners reported that they used the attack as cue.